I told him there was one. He asked me to wait till he had come in, and then the boy—the new name for manservant—would only have to make one journey in showing us to our rooms. I assented. At last the other passenger came in, and the clerk gave his instructions to the boy. In doing this I observed that he only gave him one key, from which I instantly inferred that I was done, and was only to have, after all, a part of a room; but I decided to submit, for there were only three hours to be passed in bed, and my fellow-passenger was a highly respectable storekeeper of Denver; and if I had gone out of the hotel, at that hour of the morning, with my luggage in my hand, all the rowdies about the billiard-tables, the stove, and the bar, would have known that I was going in search of a lodging, and some might perhaps have followed me out. But on the boy’s opening the door, and setting down the lamp, while he said, ‘Gentlemen, here is your apartment,’ I was no longer equal to the occasion; for now I saw—the possibility of which had never before crossed my mind—that I was expected to occupy the same bed with another man; and I gave vent to my indignation by observing, ‘that it was really too bad to be billeted off to half a bed, when I had been promised a room to myself.’ ‘As to the room to yourself,’ replied the boy, ‘I know nothing about that, and the thing is passed; but it is very unreasonable in you to complain about having half a bed, when it is a bed that is intended to hold three people.’ I asked my fellow-passenger not to regard it as anything personal that I was unable to occupy the same bed as himself, telling him that I would lie down in my clothes. Our first care, however, was to arrange what we should do in case of fire, for part of the house we were in had been in flames only a few nights before. In such a place sleep was impossible. Our room was exactly over the kitchen, and the floor having been made originally of unseasoned wood, the heat had shrunk it, so that there were gaps everywhere. Through these came up all night from the kitchen the effluvium of beefsteaks and onions, which were being cooked incessantly for the gamblers, who would themselves have kept anyone awake with the noise they made, the chief part of it consisting of the most ingenious and horrible oaths one ever heard, or will ever hear, as swearing is everywhere else becoming obsolete. On coming down, a little after six, for the seven-o’clock train, I found a few persons still drunk about the bar; and all the rest of those I had seen three hours before were now asleep on the floor, on chairs, or on the billiard-tables. These are persons who do not care for beds, or who would rather spend the price of them in drinking and gambling. [Sidenote: _Lynch Law and the Pistol._]